Founder of Elite Event Thailand, Trinai ‘Best’ Bhanusiriyawatra, traded 14 years in five-star hotel PR for an event business with reputation for pulling off things that seem impossible.
Every island has an expert on speed dial. In Koh Samui, Best is the person everyone calls when something big has to happen — a celebrity wedding, a corporate incentive trip, a television crew that needs someone who knows the island inside and out.
Best runs Elite Event Thailand, a specialty event, wedding and MICE management company under Elite Group International (EGI). He has spent close to two decades creating effortlessly elegant events like destination weddings as well as guiding the crew of HBO’s The White Lotus. We sat down with him to hear how he pulls it off:
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From hotel PR to founding Elite Event Thailand: Best moved to Koh Samui in 2005 to work in PR and marketing at Six Senses Samui. From there he moved to The Library as Senior Sales and Marketing Manager, then finished his hotel career as Director of PR and Marketing at Banyan Tree Samui.
Fourteen years working in five-star hotels imparted something more than just experience: real relationships he can count on and a clear knowledge of what discerning clients expect. That became the foundation for Elite Event Thailand, and later, EGI.
Under EGI’s roof are five companies covering destination weddings, corporate events, conferences and incentive travel, not only on Koh Samui but across Phuket, Krabi, Koh Phangan, Khao Lak, Chiang Mai, Hua Hin and Bangkok.
Their work as a team is highly regarded and recognised across the industry. In 2024, Elite Event Thailand won Best Wedding Coordination Company Thailand at the Global Wedding Awards. In June 2026, EGI became the first DMC and event organiser on Thailand’s Eastern Southern Coast to earn the Certified Incentive Specialist certification, backed by SITE Global and Thailand’s Convention and Exhibition Bureau.
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The endless pull of Koh Samui: “The island lets you live at whatever pace you want,” Best says of his home. “You can slow right down or drive 20 minutes and have a completely different kind of day.”
It’s the people, more than the scenery, that he credits most for staying here. Samui’s hospitality crowd is close-knit, and Best puts a good share of his success down to the partnerships built across two decades on the island.
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His favourite wedding needed 92 florists: Ask Best to name his favourite wedding event and he’ll tell you every one has its own story. Push a little, and one comes to the fore: a Thai-American wedding in June 2024 that took nine days to build, required 92 florists from across the country, and put more than 400 people to work on a single venue.
The couple had one particularly bold request: a live performance from Grammy-winning musician and producer David Foster at the reception. Best’s team made it happen, and the event welcomed a run of high-profile guests and celebrities, making it one of the most prestigious weddings ever held on Koh Samui.
An HBO highlight to be proud of: A year later, Best’s team took on a very different brief: local coordination for HBO’s The White Lotus Season 3, across its 45-day shoot on Koh Samui. Weddings one month, a global television crew the next. Best’s team has become the people you call when you need something that seems impossible, done.
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Best’s intel on the best time to plan a wedding: “January through August is the safe window with February and March the standout months,” says Best. “Expect calm seas, clear skies, and sunsets that photographers get excited about.:
October and November sit inside the island’s rainy season, and Best steers most clients away from booking then. Rain itself is manageable with the right planning. Uncertainty is the part nobody can plan around.
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The unglamorous side of wedding planning: Flowers and lighting get the attention. Logistics is where the real work happens, and Koh Samui rarely makes it easy.
Some of the island’s best venues sit on steep hillside roads. Others are right on the sand, out of reach for trucks. A fair few have no loading area at all, which means décor, staging and sound gear often travel in by hand, on a schedule built around not disturbing the neighbors next door.
Add a custom-built structure or an elaborate floral installation, then factor in weather, ferry timetables and transport from the mainland, and the puzzle gets considerably harder.
Best’s team has spent years building the local knowledge and supplier relationships that make it work anyway. For him, most things that look impossible on paper are really just a planning problem waiting for someone who knows the island. Solving it, every time, is what makes the job worth doing.
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Want to know how Best’s list of the island’s best? Here’s his Little Black Book of Koh Samui
A long, lazy lunch: Salt Society at Centara Reserve Samui.
A quick coffee fix: Flo Coffee Roaster.
A date that actually matters: Long Dtai at Cape Fahn Private Island.
A fun night with friends: Moonrise Beach Cafe, or Miss Samui Restaurant.
A proper nightcap: Tikki Box.
Best beach club: 79 Beach Club, no contest.
Songkran, done properly: the middle of Chaweng Beach.
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